Repositories and Self-Archiving

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A Repository is an online databases used by institutions & organizations to capture, preserve, and provide access to the intellectual output of a scholarly community. They gather and disseminate a variety of scholarly materials; this includes not only publications in peer-reviewed journals, but also products of education and research not published elsewhere such as data sets, preprints, postprints, syllabi, theses, and dissertations. They are open access, they can provide accessibility even after an article has been published in a subsription based journal. This is known as the green open access model.

Depositing, also known as self-archiving, in an institutional or subject repository has many benefits. It ensures the long-term digital preservation of your work. It can gather all of a scholar's work in one accessible online location, eliminating article requests. It makes work widely available and findable via Google, increasing research impact.

The Digital Collections of Colorado is the University of Colorado system's Institutional Repository. CU Boulder materials are located within the DCC @ Boulder. More information about the advantages of depositing and the procedures can be found in the CU Boulder Institutional Repository FAQ.

Most academic journals requie scholars to sign over their copyright on their work to the publisher. Each publisher has a different policy on what and when an article can be deposited, the terms are often spelled out in the author agreement. In order to avoid losing copyright and the ability to self-archive, the Library recommends publishing in Open Access journals or adding an author's addendum to their agreement with the publisher, these will often either maintain the author's copyright or reserve the right to self-archive.

Several research funding agencies require that the resulting article be deposited. Currently scholars who recieve funding from the NIH are required to deposit their work in PubMed Central in compliance with the NIH's Public Access Policy.FRPAA legislation is currently pending and would expand the open access mandate to all federally funded research. Some universities, such as Harvard have adopted a campus-wide open access and self-archiving mandate.